Hacks track

We want to know how you pulled it off. Show us your most ingenious hacks, kludges, work-arounds, and duct-tape jobs. It doesn’t have to be elegant, it just has to work!
Hacks are clever, sometimes not. They break the rules. They force the available material into doing what you need or want. Some hacks are illegal, and some just make you proud and/or embarrassed that it worked. Sometimes a hack is the only way. Show the world how you make your hardware and software obey your every whim. Example topics from the past include “Control Emacs with Your Beard: the All-Singing All-Dancing Intro to Hacking the Kinect” and “Location-Based Hacks – How to Automate Your Life with SMS and GPS.”

Everybody today has heard of electric vehicles, yet almost nobody has ever seen one, touched one, or driven one. I think this is a shame and would like to correct that. Come join me for 45 minutes of explanation and demonstration about the basics of electric vehicles from electric bicycles all the way to passenger vehicles. Building these vehicles at home is easily within the realm of anybody unafraid to pick up a few simple tools and learn a few basic concepts.

Getting into Software Defined Radio (SDR) used to require extensive
hardware knowledge, but easy-to-use platforms like HackRF are changing
that. The GNU Radio software framework is also easier to work with than
it once was. I'll show you how to get started with the software side of
SDR and cover the essential techniques needed to discover, analyze, and
produce radio signals with GNU Radio and HackRF.

All Unix/Linux users know a little shell scripting, even if they're unaware of it. Pipes, for example, are a part of the Bash/sh language. Bash/sh, i.e. shell scripting, is usually treated as just that: shell scripting. But if you're crazy enough, you can develop full-blown profession, modular, and tested (yes, tested!) programs in Bash. It takes a little finesse, but I'll show you how, and you just might think twice about using Bash--really using it--in the future.

Studying and building hardware is easier than you think. Using software concepts as a metaphor, I will reverse-engineer the 1982 arcade game machine "Robotron: 2084" and reimplement it in modern hardware.

Estimating the time a project will take is pretty much the hardest thing in software, and I don't think that's any different for any other crafting deliverable. Of course, sometimes we have done something so often that we KNOW it takes 50 minutes to make a batch of raspberry jam, but that's not the same as estimation.
So if we can't rely on our own estimation, or that of others, what can we do?
We can timebox from the other direction. Instead of trying to figure out how long something will take, we can decide how long we have to spend on it. After all, you are the boss of your creative experiences. If you don't deliver on time, it's disappointing, but probably not the end of your career.

This talk is about how I use language hacks to run the same code natively on PHP and Javascript (JS), which I call CASSIS for Client And Server Scripting Implementation Subset.
I'll describe how I discovered CASSIS, how to use the open source library cassis.js to write middleware logic once for both client & server, and real-world use cases including where I've successfully deployed cassis.js for years (even as an essential part of my own site tantek.com).

Have you been at a talk which sounded great on paper, but was lackluster in delivery? Have you discovered that some presenters can seem to make *anything* interesting? Do you want to know how to hack audiences to convince them that your talk is *freakin' amazing* even though it's content-challenged? Want to use your conference presentation skills to kickstart your career in world domination?
BYO tinfoil hat.

Most GIS were not specifically designed to manage dynamic spatiotemporal data. Spatiotemporal mapping is the representation of changes in geographical phenomena. By identifying the characteristics of the spatial, temporal and attributional dimensions, we evaluate OSGIS techniques for data storage, retrieval, pattern analysis and visualization.

In the age of Agile, it's important for teams to get quick feedback on designs to keep sprints moving, but Omnigraffle wireframes are no match for the rich interactions of the modern web. This represents an opportunity for smart developers to create prototypes with working functionality that can be rapidly tested and changed based on incoming data from teammates and users.

Clonezilla is popular for system deployment. However, there are some limitations. E.g. the destination partition must be equal or larger than the source one, software RAID/firmware RAID is not supported, or the image can not be explored. So any workarounds for them? In this talk we will describe and demonstrate the workarounds about breaking the limitations.

Know how you get all those great free tshirts at conferences? Don't you hate how they never seem to fit your feminine figure? Or worse yet, all that's left is sizes that are too big or too small! This talk will show easy modifications and alternative uses for those awesome conference tshirts!

I will present MoSQL, an open-source tool for mirroring data from MongoDB to PostgreSQL. I will argue for mixed SQL/NoSQL environments, and talk about my experience using MoSQL to expand the availability of easy access to data internally at Stripe.

While Wikipedia may be the best known MediaWiki project, there are many third party projects that also run on this platform, some of whom are not always entirely happy with their hosts - so they leave. This is Uncyclopedia's story of how we left Wikia, where we may have gotten slightly carried away, grabbed everything but the kitchen sink, and then just beat all the random parts with shovels until they started working.

Private properties are not built-in to the JavaScript language, but can be attained through various mechanisms in the language. We will explore tricks to associate private state with objects while taking full advantage of prototypal inheritance.

During this talk Schalk will go over all the bits and pieces you need, and have access to, to not only write apps but, also effectively debug and test your apps before submitting them to the Marketplace or serving them up directly from your own site.